President Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, launched an internal effort during the 2012 re-election to try and stop staffers from leaking sensitive information about the campaign’s technology operations to the media, POLITICO has learned.

In the wake of reports about the Obama campaign’s digital voter-targeting efforts, several staffers were questioned about whether they had leaked sensitive technological information to the press, sources familiar with the inquiries said. Those who were questioned were led to believe that there would be serious disciplinary action taken should they be identified as leakers.

In May, after The Guardian published an article about the Obama campaign’s web-based Dashboard program, the campaign pulled staff email to try and identify leakers, the sources said. One staffer who was punished during this investigation was Teddy Goff, the campaign’s digital director who is now a founding partner at Precision Strategies, the political media consulting firm he launched with two former Obama deputy campaign managers.

Following the May report, Goff was forced to apologize to senior campaign staff for corresponding with Ed Pilkington, the Guardian reporter, without the campaign’s permission. Messina, who now serves as chairman of Organizing For America, which uses the Obama campaign’s digital database, told POLITICO by email that Goff “did not leak any confidential information.” He declined to comment on the leak crackdown.

Over the course of the campaign, various reports by Pilkington, Slate’s Sasha Issenberg, and others detailed the Obama campaign’s innovative methods for collecting and analyzing voter data. In addition to Dashboard, these included Project Dreamcatcher, Project Narwhal and an unprecedented plan to link the campaign’s vast database of individual voter records to Facebook profiles.

Around the time that the first reports surfaced in January and February of 2012, Messina called several staffers into a meeting and, according to sources with knowledge of the events, left them with the impression that the staffers could face disciplinary action if they were caught leaking proprietary information to the press. But, according to sources, no staffer was ever publicly identified as being the source of the leaks, nor was any staffer disciplined.

Goff declined to comment for this story. Ben LaBolt, the spokesperson for the campaign, also declined to comment.

In “This Town,” the new book about the culture of Washington, D.C., New York Times Magazine reporter Mark Leibovich reports that one of the Obama campaign’s “celebrated computer whiz kids” had been forced to apologize for leaking proprietary technology information. Leibovich did not identify Goff by name, nor did he report on Messina’s crackdown.